Customer Reviews

For All Practical Purposes (Paper): Mathematical Literacy in Today's World

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

Before I actually received my copy of this book, I thought the other reviewers had to be exaggerating.

They weren't. This book is horrible.

-Even the simplest concepts take the author ten paragraphs to explain. I'm beginning to wonder if they paid him/her/them by the word.

-There are lots of charts and examples in this book, but they are rarely ever on the same page as the text that explains them. The constant flipping back and forth has made the front of my book look like I wadded it up and stuffed it back in the cover.

-This book is FULL of errors and incorrect solutions. I just spent 45 minutes working and reworking a problem because it didn't match the "solution" in the back of the book. I was beginning to think that maybe I didn't understand the material..and then I realized that the author screwed up and that the solution is incorrect. This is not the first time this has happened, and I'm only halfway through the book. :(

If you have a good instructor (especially one that has figured out all the errors and can point them out to you), you might have a fighting chance. For those of you, like me, who are using this book for an online/distance learning course...you're in for a miserable semester.

I highly suggest buying the study guide that goes with this book. It was written by someone else, and it has helped me immensely.

Mathematical literacy is an important characteristic in the modern technological world, powerful calculators and computers cannot replace the fundamental knowledge of how mathematics is used. People are bombarded with data, statistical and mathematical arguments and they must manage a large part of their world by applying mathematics. There is no greater argument to support this than the current home mortgage crisis in the United States. Many of the people who are facing foreclosure did not completely understand their mortgages and the consequences if their mortgage rates were to rise. The mathematics of finance are simple to understand, yet were so often ignored.
The topics covered in this book are:

*) Management science - the basics of graph theory and how it is used to plan routes; optimize the use of resources and plan the sequencing of the tasks needed to build a large object.
*) Statistics - how data is collected, processed and interpreted to turn it into information.
*) Probability - the basic rules of probability and how it can be used in statistics.
*) Voting and social choice - the basic concepts of voting, how it can be made fair and how certain conditions can prevent a fair election from being held.
*) Fairness and game theory - coverage of some of the basic principles of game theory and how apparently irrational choices can be shown to be thoroughly rational.
*) Information science - some of the basics of encryption and data compression
*) The geometry of growth, patterns and tilings
*) The mathematics of finance - the growth of money earning interest, and the economics of resource allocation and consumption

The breadth of coverage is certainly what the modern citizen needs to understand; recent elections in the United States demonstrate that citizens need to know more about how elections are actually held. As we observed in the presidential election of 2000, despite the fundamental resilience of the voting process, the American electoral system does not work well when there is in essence a tie.
The exposition is readable; there are a large number of worked examples that cover all of the material. Key points are highlighted and a large number of exercises are given at the end of the chapters. Solutions to the odd-numbered problems appear in an appendix.
The level of presentation is such that advanced high school or early college students can understand it. If done in high school, a full year course would be more appropriate than trying to punch through it all in one semester.

I use this book for a high school math class that I teach and I have a love hate relationship with it. It covers a lot of the basic aspects of finite mathematics. It is is a liberal arts mathematics text, and without going into Logic, or specific computer applications, it covers a lot of the principals of discrete mathematics. The way I am using it is more survey and less rigor. The book provides fairly thorough explanations and examples. The problem sets at the end of each chapter are exhaustive and exhausting, and often, rather redundant.

I do not think it has as many wrong answers as students and some reviewers here have assigned it.

Though it occasionally does have some wrong answers *most textbooks do*, my problem with this book is that it is disorganized, it lacks a basic understanding of the methodologies of teaching, and has a presumptuously high level of dependence on the students' scheme(what a student come into the classroom already knowing).

First, the text and the related charts and figures are often on different pages. It is almost comical to be in the classroom and have to tell the students, "Oh, by-the-way, a really good chart illustrating this concept can be found 5 pages back." "Don't worry, if you use two books you won't have to keep flipping back-and-forth."

The texts lack of methodology limits it greatly. Quite often, success depends on being able to set up a problem correctly. The curriculum's attempt to teach this skill either helps way too much, and the student is not given anything to practice, as seen in the students' study guide, or is no help at all, and the students are just expected to know how to set up problems. This is the way it is in the problems at the end of the chapter.

As for the presumptuous dependence on scheme: I have had many very bright students giving wrong answers, not because they do not understand the math, but because the questions being asked were relating the math to experiences that no one in the classroom has ever had. If a question is going to be applying mathematical concepts or models to a city's water or sewer pumping stations, then the chapter needs to let the students know some information about pumping stations. The text takes responsibility for explaining in detail the math concepts, but assumes a commonality in the situational applications that is rather unrealistic.

I require all of my students to have a study guide. The reason I do is because the textbook is dry reading, and long winded. The study guide is concise, and covers the same material with programmatic step by step examples. These are much more useful in the formative stage than the problems at the end of the chapter in the textbook.

A lot of these problems simplify to the common denominator, that there is no true teacher's edition. That's right, there is no teacher's edition. There is a complete solutions manual available to the teachers..., it shows the solutions, but in order to know the question, the teacher has to be looking in the textbook. Picture this, I am grading Johnny's paper, and his answer does not look like anything in the solutions book. I think, "Hmmmm, where did Johnny go wrong..." But since Johnny did not take the trouble to re-write the problem down for me, and the solution key does not show the question either, I have to go to the textbook to find out what the question is. This makes thoughtful grading of papers a nightmare. Like the figures and charts, this is another example of the information not being where it is needed.

Not having a teacher's edition is a big red flag which says, "INSTRUCTION IS AND AFTERTHOUGHT".


It is not all bad though.

A lot has been put together for this Textbook: It has a Study Guide, Student Solutions Manual, a Teacher's Solutions Manual, a Guide for First Time Instructors("Oh-my-goodness, they are starting to use the textbook, we had better help them out.) , and a Testing Bank Manual, while the *website has: quizzes, java apps, power point presentations, projects and more*

The question that seems to have been answered is, "What material should be thought?" The questions that seem not to have been answered are, "How should this information be organized for the sake of the students and the teachers?" and "What is the best way to teach this material?"


Personally, I have grown comfortable with this text, but, I can not recommend it.

This book provides a very good survey of a variety of mathematical topics and their application. Depth of treatment is lacking sometimes, but the flavor is conveyed.

This is a tough text for a one semester course. It could easily be expanded into a two year math survey course. The material is interesting, but trying to fit it all into a semester makes the work too tough. There are other classes being taken in the semester you know.

This review may be a little harsh... but, if you had to sit through an entire semester with this book you would see my point. Book this is full of errors and omissions. Something that can be explained in a few sentences take pages for this author to convey and half the time the reader still has to look elsewhere for clarification of the material. Half way into the semester I had to stop reading the thing and do subject research using other sources. Amazing someone would publish a text book this bad.

Ordered this book just in time to have it for my math class, now the class is over and I never received this book. I never got a notification that it had been sent, either.

I got this product at a great value. Most people paid about 60-70 dollars, maybe even more at the University bookstore. I think I recall that I paid less than ten dollars. However, I have yet to actually use this book in class. The only time the teacher has cracked it open was to show there were errors in it. We have homework assignments out of the book, but they aren't for a grade; they are just for practice. This is hardly necessary with at least the stuff we have been learning the first few weeks of class.
To at least those in the WMU math class, I only suggest buying this if you are very unsure of your math skills or feel like you need to practice anyway.

I was sent the completely wrong book. When I tried to contact the seller over a month ago...No response..Till this date. I have no use for the book that was sent to me